5 Devastating Passages from Kevin D. Williamson’s Salvo Against Trump
by Ben Weingarten for Encounter
National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson lambastes the current Republican presidential frontrunner in his new Encounter Broadside The Case Against Trump. For your reading pleasure, we’ve pulled five of Williamson’s most stinging passages below:
1) The Illiberal (Former) Liberal
There is a profoundly illiberal tendency ascendant in American politics, and Donald Trump is its personification — not only anti-trade but venomously anti-immigrant, anti- commerce, nativist, populist, crude, and driven by anxiety. Trump is all those things and more.
2) The Little Lord Fauntleroy of Fifth Avenue
One has to respect Trump as a thespian: he is, after all, the Little Lord Fauntleroy of Fifth Avenue, a coddled product of the bottom end of the Ivy League, a draft dodger, and a man whose idea of kinetic adventure is golf. That lion-hunting dentist that the world was so mad at is Ernest Hemingway next to Trump.
3) The Paris Hilton of Politics
Trump’s celebrity is of an odd sort. He is famous for being a wildly successful businessman, but it is not clear that he is any such thing. His career has, if anything, more closely resembled that of Paris Hilton, another heir to a splendid fortune who converted tawdry tabloid celebrity into a reality-television franchise, spinning that fame into a number of businesses that consist largely of renting her name to consumer-goods companies and entertainment venues.
4) There’s No Business Like Trump Business
Trump would soon come to adopt the view that there is no such thing as bad publicity: he was mainly known to the world as a tabloid cretin for many years, with his high-profile divorce from Ivana Trump, his affair with Marla Maples (who, like Trump, would go so far as to participate in professional wrestling events in the service of furthering her celebrity), the bankruptcies, the rivalry with Merv Griffin, and the inevitable lawsuits between them. The fantastic tackiness of his style, epitomized by the gold-plated seat-belt buckles on his personal airplane, is the stuff of legend. When the producers of The Devil’s Advocate, a cheesy Al Pacino vehicle in part about a despicable New York City billionaire real estate developer who is guilty of a multiple murder (and, it is suggested, a quasi-incestuous pedophiliac affair with his stepdaughter), they must have been shocked at their good fortune when Trump allowed them to use his apartment, with its gilt moldings, imitation frescoes, and faux-rococo furnishings as a set. Trump was the butt of the joke, but that’s showbiz.
And showbiz is very much what the Donald Trump presidential campaign is all about.
5) Pander or Proposal?
Trump’s proposal — more of a posture, in truth — that Mexico be made to pay for the wall is so silly as to hardly deserve being addressed. Trump holds out the threat of cutting off foreign aid to Mexico as a cudgel with which to beat the Mexicans into submission, but U.S. foreign aid to Mexico is trivial, and it amounts to barely a rounding error on remittances sent from Mexican nationals in the United States home to family in Mexico. With that in mind, Trump threatens to put a levy on the wages of Mexicans working illegally in the United States and fund the wall with the proceeds. This would require unprecedented surveillance of effectively all individual Americans’ banking activity and transfers and presumes a body of knowledge — the source and recipients of illegal wages — that does not exist. Indeed, if the U.S. government had at its disposal that sort of information about wages being paid illegally to illegal aliens, it could simply intervene directly in the workplace and solve almost the entirety of the illegal-immigration problem at one go.
BONUS: The Art of the Deal — “Don’t Do Stupid Stuff”
Trump’s go-to position is that the United States faces the problems that it faces because its leadership is “stupid” — stupid here mainly meaning “not Donald Trump” — which allows Americans to be exploited by wicked foreigners. In Trump’s mind, the millions who have come to the United States from Mexico and Central America are not desperately poor people fleeing dysfunctional societies and oppressive governments but rather pawns in a plot hatched in Mexico City to flood the United States with criminals — “rapists,” in his famous insistence, another bit of that characteristic sexual panic at the heart of Trumpism. Meanwhile, U.S. trade deficits and the disruptive effects of globalization are not natural outgrowths of technological change, specialization, and comparative advantage, but rather are the result of scheming, mainly in Beijing but also in Mexico City. Trump’s trade platform is, essentially, to negotiate good deals instead of bad deals, a proposal that he forwards with something that seems very much like the earnest conviction that this never has occurred to anybody else.
You can hear more about Kevin D. Williamson’s The Case Against Trump in our extensive Encounter Books interview with the prolific National Review columnist below:
Ben Weingarten is a writer, podcaster, and Founder & CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and publication services firm. You can find his work at benweingarten.com, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Previously, Ben was publishing manager and editor of TheBlaze Books, host and producer of TheBlaze Books podcast, and a frequent Blaze contributor focusing on defense, economics, politics, and history. Prior to joining TheBlaze, he worked as a financial advisor specializing in bankruptcies and restructurings. Ben is a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in economics-political science and contributed to outlets including the Breitbart sites and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. In 2015 he was selected as a Publius Fellow to the Claremont Institute.
